The English lakes

670
LIB72_e_

THE

ENGLISH LAKES

Painted by EWHaslehust R.B.A.

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LOS ANGELES

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THE

ENGLISH LARES

DESCRIBED BY A. G. BRADLEY
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Dartmoor.

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The English Lakes.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Facing
Page

vKce

ConistOn Lake Frontispie.

Windermere from Orrest Head 5

Rydalmere 12

Thirlmere and Helvellyn 16

Grasmere from Loughrigg 21

Kirkstone Pass and Brothers Water 28

UUswater 33

Derwentwater from Friars Crag 37

Bassenthwaite Lake and Skiddaw 44

Head of Buttermere and Honister Crag . . . .48

Honister Pass — Dawn 51

Scale Force, Crummock Water 54

889116

WINDERMERE AND CONISTON

The luxuriance of Windermere is of course its
dominant note, a quality infinitely enhanced by that
noble array of mountains which from Kirkstone to
Scafell trail across the northern sky beyond the broad
shimmer of its waters. The upward view from various
points in the neighbourhood of Bowness, for obvious
reasons of railroad transportation, has been the first
glimpse of the Lake District for a majority of two
or three generations of visitors, and this alone gives
some further significance to a scene in any case so
beautiful. Orrest Head, a few hundred feet above
the village of Windermere, is the point to which the
pilgrim upon the first opportunity usually betakes him-
self; for from this modest altitude the entire lake with

6 THE ENGLISH LAKES

its abounding- beauty of detail, and half the mountain
kingdom of Lakeland, are spread out before him.

On the slopes of Orrest, too, is the house of Elleray,
successor to that older one in which Professor Wilson,
by no means the least one of the Wordsworthian band,
led his breezy, strenuous life. Son of a wealthy Glas-
gow merchant, winner of the Newdigate and a first
classman at Oxford, and scarcely less conspicuous for
his athletic feats and sporting wagers, young Wilson
bought the land at Elleray while an undergraduate
and built a house on it later, after the passing of an
unsatisfactory love affair. As ** Christopher North"
every lover of the rod with any sense of its literature
knows him yet. Nor would all this be worthy of
record were it not that the brilliant little band who
did none of these things held Wilson of Elleray as
one of themselves. Losing his fortune ten years later
through a defaulting trustee, he became the brilliant
supporter of Blackwood and Professor of Moral
Philosophy in Edinburgh University, though always
retaining his connection with Windermere. In fact,
when Scott made his memorable visit to the Lake
District, and with Lockhart and Canning stayed
with the then owner of Storrs Hall, now a hotel on
the lake shore, we find Wilson doing the honours of
Windermere as commodore of its large fleet of yachts.

Country houses, villas, and rich woods cluster

WINDERMERE AND CONISTON 7

thickly up and down either shore; here and there
perhaps a little too thickly. But the general prospect
up to Ambleside on the one hand, and down past
Curwen Island — named after one of the oldest of
Cumbrian families— to Newby Bridge on the other, is
no whit blemished. One feels it to be a region rather
of delightful residence, which indeed it is, than of
temporary sojourn for the tourist, with the mountains
beckoning him into the deeper heart of Lakeland and
to more primitive forms of nature. Shapely yachts
flit hither and thither, less alluring steamboats plough
white furrows, while the irresponsible pleasure boat
is in frequent evidence. Occasionally, too, there are
winters when the great lake glistens with thick
glassy ice from end to end beneath snov/-peaked
mountains, and the glories of such a brief period —
glories of scene and of physical exhilaration — shine
out in the memory yet more luminously than the un-
failing pageants of summer; even the pageants of early
June when the lake is quiet, and in sequestered bays
the angler, like his neighbour of Derwentwater, cele-
brates the festival of the May-fly, the only one seriously
observed by the lusty and wily trout of these two
waters.

The personal associations of these opulent shores
of Windermere are too crowded for us here; but Dr.
Arnold of Rugby had, of course, his hoHday home of

8 THE ENGLISH LAKES

Foxhowe near the Ambleside end, which is still occu-
pied by his daughter.

Calgarth and its fine woods, just under Orrest, is
the oldest and perhaps the most notable place on the
lake, partly because in ancient times the well-known
family of Phillipson lived there, though in a former
house, a dare-devil race in the Civil War period, one
of whom, known as Robert the Devil, did all sorts of
heady things. The skulls of Calgarth^ too, which oc-
cupied niches in the old hall and could never be got rid
of, wherever flung to, always returning to their place
on the wall, are a treasured legend of the district. But
the present mansion and woods of Calgarth are little
more than a century old, and are the work of another
Lakeland luminary of the Wordsworthian period.
Bishop Watson, officially of Llandaff but otherwise of
Calgarth, is famous in ecclesiastical history and of
immortal memory in Wales, not for the things he did,
but rather for the things he left undone. For he was
bishop of Llandaff for about thirty years, and only
once visited his diocese in that period, preferring the
life of a country gentleman at Windermere.

Precisely parallel to Windermere, a little more
than half its length and half its breadth, and four
miles to the westward, lies Coniston, its head in the
mountains, its foot almost trenching on another, and
virtually lowland, country. There can be no doubt

WINDERMERE AND CONISTON 9

whatever about the presiding genii of Coniston, the
**01d Man" in the substance and Ruskin in the sha-
dowj if one may put it that way, having no rivals.
The hills crowd finely around their leader, the *'Allt-
maen " (lofty rock), at the lake-head, as our artist well
shows. As the lake shoots southward, however, in a
straight line, without any conspicuous curves or head-
lands, and no heights comparable to those it leaves
behind, one feels upon thus looking down it that
Coniston lacks something of the fascination which
never flags at any part of the other lakes. If
Windermere, too, trails away from the mountains, it
does so in glorious bends and headlands, curves and
islands, and has an opulence of detail and colouring
all its own. But if Coniston, with its straight un-
broken stretch all fully displayed, and framed in a
fashion less winsome than Windermere, and less im-
posing than Ullswater, "lets you down" a little on
arriving at its head, looking upward from its centre it
assuredly lacks nothing, while the view from Ruskin's
old home of Brantwood, perched high among woods
upon the eastern shore, commands all that is best of
it. After thirty years of intermittent residence here,
Ruskin was buried in the churchyard at Coniston,
exactly half a century after Wordsworth had been
laid to rest at Grasmere. A generation later than
his great predecessor he has Coniston to himself And

10 THE ENGLISH LAKES

if the points of divergence between the two seers have
been more than sufficiently insisted upon, it is from
the very fact, perhaps, that in intellect and temper-
ament they had so much in common.

THE HEART OF LAKELAND
RYDAL AND GRASMERE

Those delectable little sister lakes of Rydal and
Grasmere probably suggest themselves to most of us
as the heart of Lakeland. If we took a map and
measuring rule we might possibly be surprised to find,
as we should do, this vague intuition geometrically
verified. How singularly felicitous, then, one may surely
deem it, that Wordsworth lived and died here, and
that the shrine of the sage and all thereby implied
should be thus planted in the very innermost sanc-
tuary of the hills.

The intrinsic charm of these two little lakes and
all that pertains to them lies in the delightful variety
exhibited within a small compass of wood and water,
of rugged crag and fern-clad slope, of velvety park-
like meadow and stately timber. The blithesome
Rothay unites the upper and larger lake of Grasmere

RYDAL AND GRASMERE ii

with Rydal Water by a short half-mile display in mea-
dow and ravine of every winsome mood that a moun-
tain stream has at command. The broken, straggling
heights and skirts of Loughrigg Fell fill most of the
western side of either lake, and on a minor scale, like
the stream below, show every type of form and col-
ouring, of drapery primeval or man-made, from naked
crag to bowery lawn, all within the compass of three
miles and the modest altitude of a thousand feet.

Rydal Water has almost the air of being designed
for the embellishment of man's immediate haunts.
With its occasionally reedy fringe, it breathes the
spirit of quiet, almost domestic beauty, and of the
spirit of solitude scarcely anything. Of Grasmere
as much and as little might be said. The atmosphere
of seclusion that wraps at normal times so many of
the lakes seems here frankly absent. Nothing, indeed,
is lost by this sense of human propinquity; for all is
exquisite. But the sign of appreciative humanity,
residential or transient, is more than commonly strong.
Yet Grasmere is a favourite haunt, too, of the serious
pedestrian, not merely because it is beautiful, but
because it is central. The lake tourist might be rea-
sonably classified under four heads: the crag climbers,
the strenuous walkers, the saunterers, and the road-
sters. The first are a mere handful, for obvious reasons,
and greatly affect Wastdale Head. The second are

12 THE ENGLISH LAKES

not very numerous, and seem on the decline. The
third include a substantial number, whose limitations
are dictated either by lack of physical strength or
an indifference to the strenuous life; by a preference
for the tennis court, or croquet lawn, or a pair of
sculls, with a further company, always numerous
among Britons, who have an unconquerable aversion
to missing a single one of the four conventional
meals. Of the roadsters, the cyclist may get a great
deal out of the Lake country, and is nowadays quite
innocuous to others. As for the motor, it has proved
for all true lovers of this region an unmitigated curse.
It is truly pitiable to see these green vales half buried
at times under dense volumes of driving dust, or the
same noisome clouds falling in heavy niasses on the
fair surface and flowery banks of Rydal or UUswater.
The roads, too, are often tortuous and narrow. There
was a talk at one time of prohibition within Lake-
land, and there would seem in equity no justification
in this glorious holiday preserve for unlimited vehicles
roaring through it at twenty to thirty miles an hour.
It lies on no main highway. And for touring use within
the district the motor has no single point of sanity.
One might almost as well thrash up and down
Grasmere in a steam yacht. Their exclusion, with
a few exceptions for local purposes or for genuine
residents, would be an enormous gain, and any counter

RYDAL AND GRASMERE 13

plea ridiculously inadequate. I have here pictured
Rydal Water as a winsome summer lake, for this I
am sure, before most of us who know it, its image rises.
But upon a spring day some years ago I watched
it raging with abnormal frenzy under the influence
of a helm wind, cleaving diligently myself in the
meantime to a stone wall, lest peradventure I should
be blown into its seething waters. These hurricanes
are idiosyncrasies of the Lake country, and are formed
by the contact of winds from the North Sea with the
warmer temperature they meet as they leap over the
Pennine range, like a wave breaking over a sea wall.
The disturbance thus created drives them down in
narrow tornadoes upon Lakeland. I have never ex-
perienced anything else like it in these islands. The
waters of Rydal on this occasion, now here and now
there, were lifted high into the air in the fashion of
successive waterspouts and hurled in hissing volumes
of sleet at a great elevation against the woody foot
of Loughrigg Fell. The sun, too, was shining brilliantly,
and every hurtling cloud of spray glittered in prismatic
colours. But above all are these two lakes bound
up with the name and fame of Wordsworth. From
one or other of the banks of them for nearly half a
century the great nature poet — the prophet, sage, and
interpreter of Lakeland — of whose fruits the world
will pluck as long as these hills endure, set forth on

14 THE ENGLISH LAKES

his almost daily ramble. Whether this or that gene-
ration decide that Wordsworth is among the elect
of their fleeting day is an altogether trumpery ques-
tion. Didactic and complaisant youth have tilted
against many a classic and passed into oblivion while
the subject of their convincing satire remains im-
movable as a granite rock. Wordsworth has struck
roots so deep into this glorious country, has so
identified it with his own personality, that even if
he were a much lesser poet, immortal fame would be
as surely his as the endurance of Skiddaw or Hel-
vellyn. But Wordsworth has a firmer grip than that
of mere atmosphere on unborn generations, though
this almost alone would endear him to all those with
any sense of feeling who love the Lake country, and
of such it is inconceivable that future generations
will not each supply their ample store. It is pedantry
to hector every man or woman who feels the spirit
of our British Highlands so perfectly expressed as
they are in this Lake country into Wordsworthian
enthusiasm. But let them alone, and as the Lake-
land fever begins to develop more strongly with each
visitation, and as spring and summer come round,
if they have the sense of song at all within them they
will put their Wordsworth at any rate within reach,
and the process thenceforward to some measure of
intimacy and delight is merely an affair of time.

RYDAL AND GRASMERE 15

Rydal Mount, standing embowered in foliage above
the road which afterwards skirts both lakes, is not
accessible, but Dove Cottage on Grasmere, where the
poet, with his gifted sister and for a time with S. T.
Coleridge, spent the years preceding his long married
life at Rydal Mount, is open to the pilgrim, be he a
devout or an indifferent one. It will be hardly less
interesting as the residence for twenty years of that
strange genius, stylist, and laudanum drinker, De
Quincey. Apart from the great Hterary obligations
under which he has laid posterity, the autobiographical
volume which deals with this Lake country, and the
brilliant circle of which he was a member, is a book
of extraordinary interest. He married a local yeoman's
daughter, and the domestic side of his life, including
a devoted and successful family, infinitely alleviates
the tragedy of his own long and indifferently successful
struggle with the fatal drug. The weak-willed but
lovable and brilliant Hartley Coleridge, too, who would
dash off a sonnet in ten minutes, lived at Nab Cottage,
on Rydal Water, till he was laid in Grasmere Church-
yard, to be followed there by Wordsworth in the
succeeding year of 1850. Wordsworth himself was
never really in touch with his humbler neighbours.
He had not the temperament for that kind of thing,
and remained a continual mystery to most of them.

''Well, John, what's the news?" said the rather

i6 THE ENGLISH LAKES

too sociable Hartley Coleridge one morning to an
old stone-breaker.

'* Why, nowte varry particlar, only aid Wuds worth's
brocken lowce ageean." This had reference to the
poet's habit of spouting his productions as he walked
along the roads, which was taken by the country folk
as a sign of mental aberration. On another occasion
a stranger resting at a cottage in Rydal enquired of
the housewife as to Wordsworth's neighbourly quali-
ties.

**Well," said she, "he sometimes goes booin' his
pottery about t' rooads an' t' fields an' takes na
nooatish o' neabody; but at udder times he'll say
*Good morning, Doily,' as sensible as oyder you or
me.

THIRLMERE AND HELVELLYN

Lying beside the familiar and continuously beau-
tiful road from Grasmere to Keswick, Thirlmere has
happily lost nothing of its pristine beauty in becom-
ing the source of Manchester's water supply. An
engine house at one point and the big dam, only
visible at the far end, are more than counterbalanced

(C166)

IISMui.

THIRLMERE AND HELVELLYN 17

in the raising for many feet of a lake that is three
miles long and only a quarter of a mile wide. That
first delicious view of it which greets the pilgrim on
the downward winding road from the pass of Dun-
maile Raise, deep channelled between the rugged wall
of Armboth Crags and the northern shoulders of Hel-
vellyn, with the pale cone of Skiddaw rising over the
hidden interval beyond, will be among the most fa-
miliar memories of the lake tourist. These grey
Armboth steeps, falling from the wild moorish table-
land above so abruptly to the water's edge, and plant-
ing everywhere their knotted pine -feathered toes in
the deep clear water, with the little promontories and
islands wooded in the like fashion, give a character
all its own to the narrow but beautiful lake. As a road
now skirts both shores, those denied the physical joy
of walking this country can get all that the banks,
at any rate, of Thirlmere have to offer. The best of
this, no doubt, is the prospect here depicted from
the lower end, with Old Helvellyn looming so near
and filling up the vista to the southward.

The little inn at Wythburn on the highway near
the lake-head where the coaches halt, unpretending
tavern in outward appearance though it is, might yet
be almost accounted as classic ground for the number
of men of note, from Scott and the lake poets on-
ward, its modest walls have sheltered. For it has

(0I&6) B

i8 THE ENGLISH LAKES

not only been for all time a halfway resting-place
between Ambleside and Keswick, but for many either
a starting, or a finishing, point in the ascent of Hel-
vellyn. It was in the little parlour of this inn a century
ago that Professor Wilson, the athletic and breezy
Scottish Intellectual, played an almost brutal practi-
cal joke on his hyper-sensitive friends — the two Cole-
ridges and De Quincey — as they all sat resting here
by the fire after a long walk one winter night. Seeing
a loaded gun in the corner, the Professor introduced
it stealthily into the group, and, pointing it up the
chimney, pulled the trigger. In the then diminutive
bar parlour, hung about with glass and crockery, the
unexpected explosion on the drug-weakened nerves
of two, at any rate, of the brilliant trio must have
been almost more than the most hardened practical
joker could have wished for.

This is, of course, the smooth side of Helvellyn, and
you may ascend it from virtually any point. Roughly
speaking, it represents a huge mound cloven half
down the middle and the refuse carted away. After
climbing the steep smooth slope from the Thirlmere
side to the top, you find yourself suddenly standing
on the edge of a precipice, almost of a crater, with the
farther side of course wanting, and in its stead beau-
tiful sweeps of glen and crag dipping gradually to
the vale where the blue coils of UUswater lie sleep-

THIRLMERE AND HELVELLYN 19

ing. Needless to add, this is but a fraction of the
prospect from Helvellyn, and to relate what can be
seen from it on a reasonably clear day would merely be
to compile a chart of the entire mountain system of
Lakeland, and for an exceptionally clear one it would
be necessary to make many and remoter additions.
To anyone in touch with these things, the summit
of Helvellyn is an inspiring spot, commanding in a
single glance the entire dominion of a race not
merely homogeneous in breed, but till recently unique
in situation. Here were a people, ranging as individ-
uals from peasant to yeomen, to put it roughly; four
hundred square miles, say, of freehold farmers, who
had never known a landlord since the Crown in the
sixteenth century held them as tenants on Border
service; a complete democracy among themselves,
into whose lives the influence of an aristocracy, as
exerted everywhere else without exception in Great
Britain, never entered. For there was no such thing
within all these wide bounds. These primitive con-
ditions passed away by degrees during the last
century. But it was such that bred the Lakelander
much as you see him now, though inevitably modi-
fied by the influx of large landlords who have bought
him out, of villa residents and countless tourists.
But here he is still, a type who till recently had
virtually no experience of what social grades and

20 THE ENGLISH LAKES

distinctions meant in his own daily life, though he
dispatched from his rugged stone homestead a steady
stream of raw lads who rose to power, wealth, and
influence in the world. The Lakelander, too, like his
immediate neighbours, is of more definitely Scandi-
navian origin than any other community in England.
His country bristles with Norse place-names; his
genuine tongue is so full of it, that an expert in old
Cumbrian, it is said, can almost read the Norse
Bible. His traditions give him an easy and indepen-
dent bearing. For two or three generations of more
or less contact with the outer world and its compli-
cations can only modify, not efface, such things. He
still remains a cheery, independent soul, but absolutely
one of Nature's gentlemen.

Now from Helvellyn you can see the Pennines,
and across the Pennines lies Northumberland. We
have nothing to do here with the Northumbrian,
but as an immediate neighbour of these others it is
interesting to note that he has less Norse blood in
him, and together with his Lothian and Berwickshire
neighbours is accounted the purest Saxon of any
Englishman. His place-names have the Saxon
flavour. Here in Lakeland we have fells and hecks
and garths and ghylls\ beyond the Pennines and
the Cheviots they are all burns and laws and tons.
The Lakelanders proper were not Border fighters as

■ >^<^T."ii-'*'.'.;,*i-:3"'

GRASMERE FROM I.OUC.HRIGG

THIRLMERE AND HELVELLYN 21

the word applies to their low country neighbours and
the Northumbrians. They were liable to service, and
frequently took a hand against the Scots, but their
savage country was not tempting to the Scottish
freebooter nor worth the risk. Nor when the tide
set the other way were they accounted as actually
of the following of the great Border houses. When
James I ascended the throne of a United King-
dom, and fondly fancied Border troubles were at an
end, that canny monarch thought to make some
money by commuting the feudal service nature of
the Lakeland statesmen's holding to a money rent.
These military tenants of the Crown met to the number
of two thousand between Windermere and Kendal
and swore that they would yield up their lives rather
than their title-deeds, which settled the matter. It
remained for the growth of national wealth, luxury,
and what we call the march of civilization to destroy
by individual land purchase, assisted by local conditions
too complex to mention, the greater number of the
Lakeland freeholders or ''statesmen".

There are still some few left in possession, but
otherwise the man himself, though now a tenant,
has by no means parted with his qualities because
his father or his grandfather parted with his freehold.

KIRKSTONE AND ULLSWATER

Kirkstone Pass looms always large in one's Lake-
land memories. For one thing, it is the ladder over
which all traffic laboriously climbs from the com-
paratively populous shores of Windermere into the
long sequestered trough of Ullswater, while for the
walker it links the eastern block of mountains to
the Helvellyn and central group. It is, I think,
the highest road pass in England, touching the line
of 1500 feet where a lonely inn claims, by a natural
inference, the uncomfortable distinction of being the
highest habitation in the kingdom. But whatever may
be the measure of its winter solitude, the cheery
turmoil of the shepherds' meeting in November, at-
tended by some three hundred more or less interested
persons, must put heart into its occupants for the
ordeal. For on that great day, crowned by a gar-
gantuan feast, the stray sheep that have wandered
from their rightful ranges and mingled with a neigh-
bouring flock are handed over, accompanied by cere-
monies of immemorial use. Then, too, a hundred or
so of collie dogs settle such disputes among them-
selves as may be of old standing, or more often

perhaps excited thereto by such unparalleled oppor-

22

KIRKSTONE AND ULLSWATER 23

tunities. A hound trail usually completes the long
day which begins betimes, for every man upon these
mountains is an enthusiast on the chase in its literal
sense, and knows as much of hounds and foxes as
many an M.F.H. elsewhere.

The steep descent into the narrow, verdant, stone-
walled, thinly peopled floor of the head of Patterdale,
with its sprinkling of little white-washed, scyamore-
shaded homesteads, is not a theme for words but for
the brush; above all for the eye itself. Caudale Moor
and Hartshope Dodd loom largest above our right
shoulder, shutting out the lofty solitudes behind, while
on the left Redscrees, Raven Crag, and Harts Crag,
and a fine confusion of rugged summits culminate in
Helvellyn, which upon this eastern side shows its
nobler and precipitous front. Brotherswater, though
but a quarter of a mile in diameter, fills the vale, and
like a jewel catches every humour of these ever-restless
skies ; gleaming betimes like molten gold, or on wind-
less noons reflecting the greys and greens of the
overhanging steeps so vividly on its glassy surface
as almost to efface itself in its own shadows ; at other
times, torn by the tempests that pour down from
Kirkstone, into a sheet of seething foam. For it is
incredible to what a fury even a little lake like this
can lash itself, when exposed to the concentrated
volleys of two or three mountain glens.

24 THE ENGLISH LAKES

The memory of one of these spectacles on Hays-
water, but a mile or so distant, is suggested by the
little hamlet of Low Hartsop at the mouth of a
lateral glen that comes in just where the valley
widens somewhat, bringing with it Hayswater beck
to join the Goldrill, which last has run through
Brotherswater. Hartsop Hall is a plain, rugged old
manor house overhung with trees on the Kirkstone
shore of the lake, long the abode of sheep farmers,
but possessed of the inconvenient disability of a
public right-of-way through the centre, now presum-
ably lapsed.

But till a few years ago a venerable champion of
popular rights, or perhaps merely a humorist with
plenty of spare time, used to make an annual pil-
grimage here, and walk in at the front door and out
at the back without any ceremony.

Low Hartshope itself is a group of some half-dozen
mellow and mossy homesteads, planted irregularly above
the beck at any time within the last five centuries.
Fine old trees of sycamore, ash, and oak spread a
protecting mantle of foliage over this snug and ancient
haunt of dalesmen — a little patch of leafy opulence
between the stern walls of fell that rise sharply on
either hand. One or two houses of the group, repre-
senting, one might fancy, the proportionate decline of
population in the dales, are falling or have long ago

KIRKSTONE AND ULLSWATER 25

fallen into ruins. Moss and ferns, stone-crop and saxi-
frage, have seized alike upon both the abandoned and
the fallen, upon the sagging flagstone roof which
covers neither more nor less of the exposed weather-
stained oak rafters than it did ten years ago, upon
the fallen stones of a more completed ruin slowly
sinking into the ground. Here may be seen, too,
the deep, oldfashioned spinning galleries thrust out
from the upper story and covered by an extension of
the roof, invaluable not merely for the summer air,
but for the lack of winter daylight in those massive,
low-browed, small -windowed fortresses where the
thrifty dalesmen dwelt. Wordsworth has celebrated
a pretty old tradition that the spindles ran truer
after the sheep had mounted the hill for their night's

rest.

Now beneath the starry sky
Crouch the widely scattered sheep,
Ply the pleasant labour, ply,
For the spindle while they sleep
Runs with motion smooth and fine,
Gathering up a trustier line.

A mile or so up the glen, the higher part a steep
cHmb, down which a beck comes leaping in successive
cataracts over black rocks feathered with fern and
rowan trees, lies entrenched between mountain walls
which rise some fifteen hundred feet above its three
sides, the lonely lake of Hayswater. Scarce a mile in

26 THE ENGLISH LAKES

length and narrow in proportion, the scene is one in
fair weather of deHghtful and impressive solitude, in
wild weather awesome to a degree bordering on the
uncanny. The mountain ridges all round are grey,
stern, and rugged, while their green, rock-strewn lower
slopes fall for the most part sharply to the water's
edge. There is nowhere even a suggestion of
humanity, but a rude boat half full of water chained
to a rock. So lonely a sheet of water of this size,
and thus nobly encompassed about and shut off from
the world, there is not in all Lakeland. On a tem-
pestuous May day some two years since the writer,
underrating the measure of ferocity that the extra
elevation of a thousand feet adds to a storm, found
himself a solitary angler, beside these gloomy shores,
amid as fine a prospect of the kind as the somberer
side of one's soul might wish for. The south-west
gale had found its way over the screes of the High
Street ridge that closes the head of the narrow valley
of which Kidsty and Grey Crag form the sides. En-
raged apparently by opposition, it was coming down
the full length of the lake in intermittent bursts of
rain-laden fury that made even keeping one's feet no
simple matter, and Ufe altogether for the moment a
moderate sort of entertainment. The fact that in the
brief pauses, while the storm drew fresh breath, I could
just keep my flies on the water in the shelter of

KIRKSTONE AND ULLSWATER 27

rocky points, and at the same time not unprofitably,
must be quoted in explanation of what might other-
wise seem a quite superfluous attendance at such a
dismal pandemonium of the elements. But these for-
tuitous encounters with nature in her most savage
mood, and in her grimmest haunts, are among the
memories that for myself I would ill spare, and none
the less so because they so often belong to the unex-
pected and the unsought.

The upper and more rugged half of the valley walls
on this sombre occasion opened and shut in veils of
scudding mist, while their steep green flanks, littered
with black crags fallen in long ages past from above,
made a fitting frame for the white hissing waters
that filled the long and stormy trough. But the
crowning feature of this particular scene was at the
foot of the lake, where it draws to a narrow point
between high rocky banks, and the out-going beck
leaps towards the gorge below through a gap in a
stone dyke which otherwise closes the entrance. For
into this funnel the storm seemed to concentrate its
fury, lashing the waters after the fashion of a helm
wind high into the air, and hurling them far down
into the ravine below.

But I do not wish to keep the reader out in the
wind and rain for the whole of our sojourn in Patter-
dale, and I should be an ingrate indeed to do so, for in

28 THE ENGLISH LAKES

many visits to this delightful haven in the Lake country
I am only too rejoiced to remember that sunshine has
far outbalanced cloud. And under such conditions
the three miles of verdant vale from Hartsop to Ulls-
water, by way of the hamlet and church of Patterdale
(named from St. Patrick) to Glenridding on the lake
shore, is as characteristic and charming a pastoral
valley as there is in all the Lake country. Cottages
and homesteads, with their sheltering tufts of foliage,
have still even this much -visited country almost to
themselves, as they had it a century ago. The Goldrill,
now a lusty stream, curves and sparkles from farm
to farm. The bordering fields terminate in pleasant
strips of woodland, or in bosky knolls of fern and rock,
while far above upon either side rise steep and high
the everlasting hills. And crowding round the head of
Ullswater, which now spreads wide its bright island-
studded waters and ends the vale, are mountains
piled up everywhere. Place Fell and Birk Fell, lift-
ing their untamed steeps of crag and scree sheer
up from the water along four miles of the eastern
shore, give that exceptional touch of wildness to the
great lake which, together with the fine grouping of
Helvellyn and her satellites upon the other side, justi-
fies in the opinion of many its claim to pre-eminence
among its sisters. For myself, I frankly admit that
the head of Ullswater, and, for choice, a lodgment

■fc*

KIRKSTONE PASS AND BROTHERS WATER

KIRKSTONE AND ULLSWATER 29

upon the Glenridding shore near the edge of the
lake, holds me more tenaciously when I get there
than any part of Lakeland.

There was once a king in Patterdale. His name
was Mounsey, and he died in 1792, and the Gentle-
man's Magazine for that year in its obituary tells
us all about him, facts confirmed, if such were neces-
sary, by local tradition. This was in the days of the
*' statesmen ", before outsiders came in and bought
property and broke in upon the old Lakeland demo-
cracy. Patterdale Hall has now this long time been
a large country house with a large estate attached
to it. In the modest original homestead, however,
reigned the Mounseys, who from time immemorial
had been regarded as '* kings " of the dale before the
reign of the undesirable and eccentric monarch who
proved to be the last but one of them.

This John Mounsey had an income of £800 a year,
and the chief efforts of his life, which lasted over
ninety years, were directed to keeping his expenses
down to ;£30. In short, he was a miser of the most
unabashed type. He was endowed with immense
physical strength, of which, unlike his money, he
grudged no expenditure in the pursuit of the over-
mastering passion of his life. He rowed his own
slate and timber down the lake to market, and toiled
all day at the hardest manual tasks. When compelled

30 THE ENGLISH LAKES

to visit Penrith or elsewhere on business, he slept
in neighbouring barns to save a hotel bill. He had
his stockings shod with leather, and always wore
wooden shoes. He is reported on one occasion, while
riding by the lake, to have dismounted, stripped, and
dived into it after an old stocking that caught his
eye. Rather than buy a respectable suit for funerals,
markets, and the like, he used to force the loan of
them from his tenants, who were also under agree-
ment to furnish him with so many free meals a year.
Ever fearful of being robbed, he used to secrete his
money in walls and holes in the ground, a practice
which occasioned many exhilarating hunts for trea-
sure-trove among the idle. His last luxury was
putting out to the lowest tender the drawing of his
will. The Patterdale schoolmaster, with a bid of ten-
pence, obtained the contract. His son, however,
closed the dynasty with honour, when the forbear
of the present owner bought the royal domain and
a good deal more beside, and planted those beauti-
ful wild woods along the western margin of Ulls-
water that are the delight of every visitor, and above
all of those for whom mountain and lake offer too
strenuous adventure.

Various glens of infinite beauty wind up to the
heart and shoulders of Helvellyn and Fairfield, which
mountains display to the people of Ullswater by far

KIRKSTONE AND ULLSWATER 31

their finest qualities. Across the lake a fine solitude
of moor and fell, rising to 2600 feet, spreads far away
eastward to Shap, including Martindale, Boredale,
Mardale, and the High Street range, which carries
the old Roman road to Carlisle (whence comes its
name, Ystrad) along its summit. The wild red deer
still roam over this wilderness as far as the shores
of UUswater, while as regards foxes they are almost
too plentiful everywhere. Nor is there any part
of England, no not Leicestershire, though in far
different fashion, where they fill a bigger place in
the public eye. Of the four or five packs of fox-
hounds hunted and followed on foot over the fells
of Lakeland, one kennelled at UUswater is among
the most notable, if only for its famous huntsman.
Every soul in Lakeland as far east as Crossfell, and
every frequenter of UUswater, knows "Joe Bowman",
who has just now completed thirty years of such
severe service as hunting a pack of fell hounds on
foot means. The mantle of John Peel (who hunted
a lower country, however, and rode to his hounds)
has almost fallen upon him. His stalwart form may
even be seen, like that of John Peel's, outside
the cover of hunting songs in the windows of Car-
lisle music shops. If the songs are not sung like
the others round the world, the memory of their
subject will live among the dalesmen, I'll warrant,

32 THE ENGLISH LAKES

to their children's children. For hunting here is
actually, not theoretically, democratic. When hounds
throw off soon after daylight on a mountain side, and
hunt a slow drag for an hour or two till they move
their fox, and the field have to follow on foot as best
they may, there is not much scope for the dashing
and the decorative side of the chase. The fell farmers
are all devoted followers, are on familiar terms with
all the foxes, their domestic arrangements, and their
families, and their probable line of action when pur-
sued. They mostly know the hounds, and can recall
their fathers and their mothers and their grand-
parents, and are steeped in hound lore. The very
children about the head of Ullswater know many ot
the ''dogs" personally, and have played with them
as puppies. For they are mostly ''walked" on the
surrounding farms in summer, and when they play
truant, which is pretty often, and come trotting
through the village after a hunt upon their own
account, it is quaint to hear them affectionately in-
voked by name from window or doorstep as familiar
public characters. The necessity for keeping down
the foxes gives, of course, an extra zest to the chase
in these mountains. There being nothing to prevent
and much to stimulate it in this country of late
lambs, hunting is carried on vigorously till the middle
of May; April, as a matter of fact, being for many

KIRKSTONE AND ULLSWATER 33

reasons irrelevant here the most active month, and
the best for seeing the sport. It is glorious, indeed,
on an early spring morning to be perched, let us say,
on one of the lower shoulders of Helvellyn, with the
joyous crash of hounds upon a warming scent echo-
ing from cliff to cliff.

But let us turn to gentler themes, noting for a
moment Stybarrow, the foot of which is the subject
of our artist's skill. There is very little of the
Border foray tradition in the heart of the Lake
country. It was obviously unprofitable as well as
risky to the aggressor. But a body of Scots did once,
at least, make a dash on Patterdale and on Sty-
barrow, which is in a sense its gateway, and met their
fate. If the eastern shore of the upper half of
UUswater is inspiring from its solitary grandeur of
overhanging mountain, its feathered cliffs and pro-
montories, its indented rocky coves, its western shore
holds one's affections by its gentler and more sylvan
beauties. For after the picturesque confusion of
mossy crag and forest glade around Stybarrow, be-
neath which the lake Hes deep and dark, the two
large demesnes — "chases" would best describe them
— of Glencoin and Gowbarrow slope gently down from
the back- lying mountains to the curving shore.
Here are pleasant silvery strands overhung with
tall sycamores and oaks; there are rocky shores

( C 156 C

34 THE ENGLISH LAKES

fringed with hazel and alder, where the crystal
waters of this most pellucid of large lakes breaks
sonorously when a gale is blowing. The little becks
come tumbling in too over the sloping meadows from
the fells — that of Glencoin of familiar name, and that
of Aira of greater fame for its waterfall, whose hoarse
voice can be heard on still evenings on the lake, and
for the legend embodied in Wordsworth's well-known
poem. Here, too, behind the long grassy promontory
with pebbly shore that roughly marks the entry to
this upper and more beautiful four miles of lake, is
Lyulph's tower. Not a very ancient fabric, to be
sure, but marking the site of that shadowy keep
where dwelt the sleep-walking, love-lorn maiden,
who perished in the pool below Aira Force in the
arms of her errant knight, as he arrived only just
in time to drag her expiring to the shore.

List ye who pass by Lyulph's tower
At eve how softly then
Doth Aira Force, that torrent hoarse,
Speak from the woody glen.

BASSENTHWAITE AND
DERWENTWATER

What was the great Parnassus' self to thee

Mount Skiddaw? In his natural sovereignty

Our British hill is fairer far; he shrouds

His double front among Atlantic clouds,

And pours forth streams more sweet than Castally.

— IVordsworth.

Mercifully it is not our province here to pass a
pious opinion on the comparative beauties of Ulls-
water and Derwentwater. It is tolerably certain that
the one which held you the longer and the most
often in its welcome toils would have your verdict.
The lake of Ulpho is a thought wilder and grander
and withal less accessible. Save on occasions, it
wears generally a more isolated and aloof demeanour.
The other, too, is much smaller and quite differently
formed; its length, three miles and odd, being little
more than twice its breadth, but picturesquely in-
dented, and virtually surrounded by mountainous
heights. Keswick town almost adjoins, though no-
where trenching, on its lower end, and behind Keswick
the great cone of Skiddaw fills the north. Though of
no distinction in itself, not a country town in all
England is so felicitously placed. Within five minutes'

36 THE ENGLISH LAKES

walk of its extremity its fortunate burghers can
pace the shores of Derwentwater, or, better still, the
fir-clad promontory of Friars Crag, and look straight
up the mountain-bordered lake to the yet sterner
heights looming at its farther end, known as the
Jaws of Borrowdale. Behind and to the north
Skiddaw, as related, joining hands to the eastward
with more precipitous Blencathara, otherwise Saddle-
back, lifts its shapely bulk. Through a fair green
vale between, the Derwent, joined by Keswick's own
bewitching stream, the Greta, urges a bold and rapid
course to Bassenthwaite, which completes the picture
two miles below. Though not geographically central,
Keswick is nevertheless an admirable base from
whence to adventure the Lake country for such as
trust to wheels of any kind, and have no great length
of time at their disposal. The genius loci of Keswick
is of course Southey, and the plain red house where
that kind-hearted and industrious poet and brilliant
essayist lived for most of his life still stands above
the Greta. Different in every personal characteristic,
as De Quincey their mutual friend so lucidly sets
forth, was Southey from Wordsworth, his successor
in the Laureateship. The one, elegant, reserved,
modest, fastidious, business-Hke, a methodical and
indefatigable worker, but essentially a man of books;
the other, sprawly, almost uncouth in minor habits.

DERWENTWATER 37

self-centred to the verge of arrogancy in social inter-
course. Southey at Keswick earned by the Quarterly
and other sources a quite substantial income, out of
which he maintained not merely his own family, but
for long that of poor S. T. Coleridge, whose haphazard
existence consisted very largely of a succession of
extended visits to generous and admiring friends.
Wordsworth, on the other hand, ridiculed by most of
the critics, made very little out of his poems till quite
late in life. But for once in a way Providence, as
represented by pounds sterling, seemed to recognize
a dreamy genius, with no capacity for earning bread
and butter, and showered upon him from all sides
legacies, annuities, and sinecures that made him
probably a richer man than Southey, even apart from
his belated earnings.

A striking picture, too, is this ancient church of
St. Kentigern planted in the level vale — the Derwent
chanting in its rocky bed upon the one hand, and
Skiddaw lifting its three thousand feet upon the
other, with Bassenthwaite opening not far below its
broad and shining breast. Fate has laid the bones
of many a man and woman of some modest fame
in their day beneath the heaving turf of this pic-
turesque crowded graveyard, caught unawares, some
of them, while temporary sojourners in a country,
whose beauty drew hither two or three generations

38 THE ENGLISH LAKES

of pilgrims, before facilities of transport made the
achievement the simple one it is for us. Within the
church, however, a monument to John Radcliffe, the
second Earl of Derwentwater, father of that ill-fated
young man who lost his head and the vast estates
of the family in the 'Fifteen, husband, too, of Charles
the Second's daughter by the Duchess of Cleveland,
strikes an earUer and more genuinely local note. The
original nest of the Radcliffes was on Lord's Island,
one of those near the foot of the lake, and its
foundations may still be traced; but they acquired
their chief consequence through wealthy Northumbrian
heiresses. The Keswick property remained with them
till the confiscation; but it is with the ruined towers
of Dilston, near Hexham, rather than the land of their
origin and their title that the memory of the Rad-
cliffes will be chiefly associated. So one must not
linger here over the story, rather a pathetic one, in
fact, how the young peer of 1715, admirable in every
relation of life, with youth, a happy marriage, and an
immense property all to his credit, was drawn into the
rising against his better judgment, to become its chief
victim. Forced by a train of circumstances and by
an almost morbid sense of honour, as a near relative
of the exiled house, to join the ill-concerted scheme,
in which he had not even been consulted, since his
name only was wanted, his fate was a hard one, and

DERWENTWATER 39

he was duly mourned on both the Western and the
Eastern march.

"O Derwentwater 's a bonny lord,
Fu' yellow is his hair,
And glinting is his hawky 'ee
Wi' kind love dwalling there.

Another historical character intimately associated
with the Keswick country was that "Shepherd
Lord" celebrated by Wordsworth. This was the
only surviving son of the Black Clifford, whom, in
the ruthless feuds of The Roses, his mother, dreading
the vengeance which might pursue the son of such
a father, sent to be reared as a shepherd's son on
the slopes of Saddleback. Nor till he was thirty did
he emerge from this humble role to take his place
as a peer of the realm, to marry twice, and to
acquit himself reasonably well when called to public
duties from the seclusion of Borden Tower, still
standing on the Yorkshire moors above the Wharfe,
where he lived a studious Hfe. Indeed he marched
to Flodden Field, which must have irked such a
peaceful soul, one might fancy, not a little.

It is at the head of Derwentwater that the Lodore
beck makes that sonorous descent into the vale,
which, by a famous poet's frolic, as it were, achieved
a notoriety it only merits in a wet season. The
mouth of Borrowdale, however, down which the Der-

40 THE ENGLISH LAKES

went hurls its beautiful limpid streams through re-
sounding gorges to an ultimately peaceful journey to
the lake, is a place to linger in, not merely to admire
in passing, and two well-known hotels of old standing
are evidence that the public are of that opinion. If
the heights of Borrowdale make an inspiring back-
ground for the lake, as viewed from the Keswick
end, Skiddaw, as seen from Borrowdale, serves as
noble a purpose. Then there is that long array of
heights right across the lake, and those behind them,
spreading away to Buttermere.

The view from Skiddaw is well worth the long
but easy climb. Derwentwater and Bassenthwaite,
linked by the silver coil of the river in the green
vale, make a perfect foreground to a prospect which,
like that of Helvellyn, covers not only the whole of
Lakeland, but the sea coast and much more beyond.
Skiddaw, however, stands sentinel, as it were, at
this northern gateway into the Lake country, and
looks right over Cumberland, with Carlisle in the
centre of the picture, the Solway gleaming be-
yond, and behind that again the dim rolling forms
of the Scottish hills. We have nothing to do with
Carlisle, or the Eden, or Solway Moss, with Esk-
dale or Liddesdale, or any of this classic Borderland
here laid open to the view. But one may be par-
doned, when perched thus in fancy upon Skiddaw's

DERWENTWATER 41

aerial cone, for a brief reflection of how diff'erent was
the past and how strangely different the associations
of this rugged romantic Lake country with its simple,
uneventful peasant story, quite obscured what there
is of it by its more recent literary associations,
from that classic soil of Border story spreading to
the northward. *' Happy is the land ", says the old
saw, ''that has no history"; and no part of England
has so little, in the ordinary sense of the word, as
that which one looks back upon from the top of
Skiddaw. None, upon the other hand, has more than
that once blood-stained region, now spreading so fair
and green and fertile to the dim hills of Scotland,
which share its stirring tale.

Immediately below and behind the mountain
Skiddaw forest spreads — an unusual sight in Lake-
land— its heather-clad undulations, and beyond and
all around it is the green up-lying country, where
John Peel of immortal memory hunted those no less
immortal hounds. A majority of persons, I am quite
sure, still think he is a mythical person, the burden
of a fancy song, a legendary hero. But, on the con-
trary, he lived down yonder in Caldbeck, and only
died in 1854. You may see his tombstone at any
time with his obituary, and a hound, whip, and spur
carved on its face in the village churchyard. Plenty
of people still living remember him well. The late

42 THE ENGLISH LAKES

Sir Wilfrid Lawson, whose home, and that of his
forbears, is easily visible from here, knew him well,
and in his youth had hunted with him. The last
time I was at Caldbeck, ten years ago, two of his
daughters, old married ladies, were still alive in the
neighbourhood, and I spent several hours myself in
company with his nephew, who, when a boy, used to
help him with his hounds. Peel was, in fact, a well-
to-do yeoman who kept a small pack of hounds,
which he hunted when and where he pleased for his
own entertainment, and, incidentally, for that of a few
of his neighbours, one of whom, Woodcock Graves,
the whilom owner of a bobbin mill and his most
constant companion, wrote the song, never dreaming
of it as more than a passing joke. Afterwards, when
Graves, having failed in business, went to Tasmania,
where he died in the 'Seventies, Mr. Metcalf, of
the Carlisle publishing house, arranged the song,
which fortuitously caught on in Cumbrian hunting
circles, and has now gone round the world. Graves
has told us all about the writing of it — tossed hastily
off one evening in Peel's little house at Caldbeck,
which anyone may see to-day. The village is full of
his relatives and connections, and I have no doubt
that the famous sportsman spoke an archaic and
forcible Cumbrian, that strangers who can understand
the ordinary fell farmer or peasant of to-day without

DERWENTWATER 43

difficulty would make mighty little of. At any rate,
his nephew Robert did! Peel was not a fell hunter of
the Ullswater pattern, but worked altogether a lower
country and rode to his hounds. He was an exact
contemporary of the lake poets, this other lion, and
there is a spice of humour in the thought! *' When he
wasn't huntin','' remarked his venerable relative to
me, in a heartfelt, reminiscent sort of tone, "he was
aye drinkin'." His view holloa, though said by those
who remember him to have been the most tre-
mendous and piercing ever let out of mortal throat,
obviously never penetrated the barrier of Skiddaw
and Saddleback and reached the ears of the Lake
poets *'in the morning".

BUTTERMERE

All nature welcomes Her whose sway
Tempers the year's extremes;
Who scattereth lustres o'er noonday,
Like morning's dewy gleams.
While mellow warble, sprightly trill
The tremulous heart excite,
And hums the balmy air to still
The balance of delight.

— Wordsworth {Ode to May),

Buttermere in May or early June! The May of
the poet, that is to say, which smiles upon us twice
or thrice in a decade, not the May of actuality which
IS spent in overcoats and blighted hopes, and bad
tempers and east winds. But there are Mays even
yet like those of the invincible tradition, and just
enough of them to save the face of the poet. And
Buttermere in the full flush of one of them stands
always out for me conspicuous in that long gallery of
bygone summer pageants, which are not the least
of those pleasant fancies kindled by the cheery glow
of the winter fireside. Ullswater and Wastwater can
turn almost any atmosphere to account. They can
grasp the glories of high June and diffuse their
radiance over shore and mountain to as much pur-

BUTTERMERE 45

pose as any, or can turn savage in the storms and
clouds of autumn with infinite grandeur.

Honister, too, though surmounted in many moods.
I almost prefer to recall in some such one as this,
when the replenished ghylls are spouting like silver
threads down the dark mountain sides to the right
and left as you draw up from SeatoUer, and the
sombre crag itself is thrusting up a rugged head
against a background of whirling clouds. But down
in the long secluded vale of Buttermere, its narrowed
trough for most of the five miles it winds its beau-
teous length, filled with the waters of two pellucid
lakes, I would have it always June, or rather that
ideal, precocious May which has planted it irrevocably
in the chambers of my soul.

Of all the better-known lakes or haunts in Lake-
land, this one is perhaps the most secluded. A dozen
miles by steep roads and some fearsome hills are
made Hght of, it is true, by the coaches of the holiday
season; but at other times the valley is cut off from
the travelling world dependent on public transport,
and its two or three small hostelries are then apt
to become very empty havens of peace amid the
hills. Lying amid bosky knolls upon the half-mile
meadowy interval, through which the Cocker sparkles
from the foot of Buttermere to the head of Crummock,
with the steep green wall of mountain, cloven here

46 THE ENGLISH LAKES

and there by the white trail of faUing streams, rising
sharply for two thousand feet above it, the pose
of this little group of cottages and homesteads
scattered around their diminutive church is perfection
itself The sense of snug seclusion from a noisy
and ever noisier world, and that, too, in a spot
familiar by name at least wherever the English
language obtains, is everywhere eloquent, and holds
one's fancy above the common. And along the steep
western shore of Buttermere itself, following a sheep
track on the rough mountain side, amid the scent of
thyme and freshly blooming gorse, the hum of bees,
with the flowers of the upland showing their shy
heads among the ragged moorland grasses, what a
picture at such time as I have in mind is this mile
and a half of limpid water, fringed upon its farther
shore by mantling woods! For though only one
residence of any kind trenches upon the margin of
either lake, this one of Hasness upon Buttermere
has been enfolded by time and taste in groves of
larch and beech and sycamore that extend half along
the lake shore, and flaunt their earliest foliage of
summer upon the glassy water. While on the rugged
oaks mingled among them, self-sown, perhaps, some
of them by hardy stunted forbears, there still flares
that golden tint in which its bursting leaf so curiously
forestalls the radiant decay of Autumn.

BUTTERMERE 47

And when the woods cease, what deHghtful natural
lawns of crisp turf sweep in little curving bays to the
mere edge, where gently shelving beaches of silvery
gravel dip into the shallow waters, and show far
out into the lake their clean white bottom beneath
its crystal depths! At the head of the lake the
Cocker comes prattling down through the meadows
of Gatesgarth, a typical mountain sheep farm, whose
Herdwicks, running to many thousands, count every
mountain within sight as their own traditional domain,
to the summit of Honister and the Haystacks — a
noble pair of sentinels closing the gateway to the
vale.

Most notable valleys in the Lake country have
their genius loci^ as is only natural in a region till
quite recent times utterly removed from the world's
life. And they are often simple folk whose sorrows
or humours have acquired immortality from the very
seclusion, the normally unruffled calm of their en-
vironment. Mary of Buttermere and her harrowing
story, for instance, would long ago have been for-
gotten in Hampshire. But no one reasonably versed
in Lakeland lore ever, I trust, crosses the threshold
of the Old Fish Inn without taking off his hat, so to
speak, to the memory of that ill-used maiden. Her
trials, however, were after all comparative ; well-looking
barmaids suffer much worse things, and men lose their

48 THE ENGLISH LAKES

lives over them in various ways once or twice a year.
But the sentiment attaching to the personality of this
mountain beauty, whom, like Phyllis, all the shepherd
swains adored, and yet further celebrated by such
visitors as penetrated to this romantic spot, including
the Lake poets, made a stir in the world when the
villain was hung as high as Haman. The press rang
with it, which meant more in those days than in
these, and the ** Beauty of Buttermere " appeared
in various forms upon the stage of London theatres.

The Old Fish Inn still stands a little way down
the meadow from the village, as it stood over
a century ago, when the yeoman father of Mary
Robinson, the heroine, presided over it, and she her-
self ministered to the hunger and thirst of his varied
guests. The gentlemen visitors no doubt turned her
head a little, though Wordsworth, who had evidently
taken a social glass there with Coleridge, reminds
him how they had both been stricken with the
modest mien of this artless daughter of the hills.
But one may safely hazard the belief that Words-
worth was more artless in this kind of divination
than the most rustic young woman who ever poured
out a glass of beer. De Quincey, who also knew her,
bears witness to the admiration the two poets had
for her, and has a sly hit at their romantic assump-
tion of her ingenuousness.

HEAD OF BUTTERMERE AND HONISTER CRAG

BUTTERMERE 49

But if Mary broke rustic hearts and held her
head a little high, she was at least a young woman
of irreproachable character, and it was in 1805 that
the distinguished stranger who gave her such for-
tuitous immortality arrived in Keswick in a hand-
some turnout and took up his abode at its chief
hotel, entering his name as the Honourable Augus-
tus Hope, M.P., a brother by assumption, modestly
admitted by the stranger himself, of Lord Hopetown.
One must endeavour, if it costs a mental effort, to
imagine the aloofness of this country and all such
regions in the year of Trafalgar, when one finds a
very poor imitation of a fine gentleman posing as
the brother of a well-known peer, taking local society
with a big S by storm, and the "county" within
reach of Keswick tumbling over one another to do
him honour. There was a sceptic here and there, to
be sure. He overdid his affability, and Coleridge
even hints that his grammar was shaky, which
nowadays would possibly be a point in his favour.
But as he franked his letters, and forgery then
meant death, the unbelieving minority were tempo-
rarily silenced, and the Honourable Augustus con-
tinued to enjoy himself very much indeed. Perhaps
so experienced a gentleman knew precisely when to
stop, for in due course he betook himself to Butter-
mere and to the Fish Inn, ostensibly to catch char

(OlM)

50 THE ENGLISH LAKES

or trout, but the only record of his sport we have is
the capture of the heart, or at any rate the hand
— for he wooed her openly and honourably — of his
landlord's daughter. What society in the vale of
Keswick, a member of whom had even christened a
recently arrived son and heir Augustus Hope^ parti-
cularly matrons with marriageable daughters, thought
of the escapade of the Honourable Augustus, history
does not say. It has no occasion; we may be quite
certain without being told. The happy day was fixed.
It arrived, and the smallest church in England tinkled
out the marriage peals with its single bell. The
Hopetown family were not represented at the wed-
ding for one excellent reason, and the aristocracy of
the vale of Keswick for quite another one. The
absence of the former was easily explained away
to so artless a gathering as was here collected.
That of the latter was only natural, and must have
provided even a spice of triumph for the victorious
Beauty of Buttermere. The honeymoon, of which
London with the brotherly welcome of a noble family
and the smiles of a Court was to be the culmi-
nation, extended very little farther than Keswick,
when the minions of the law swooped down upon
Augustus and tore him from Mary's arms on a charge
of forgery, which proved the least of his many
heinous crimes. In brief, the man's name was Hat-

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IIOMSIER I'ASS DAWN

BUTTERMERE 51

field, son of a Devonshire tradesman, and Mary was
only the last of many victims, most of them her
superiors in station, whom with marvellous skill and
cunning this accompHshed ruffian had deceived, aban-
doning them one after another in conditions of
distress, and some of them with children. He was
hung at Carlisle, and Mary returned to her father's
inn and resumed her former position. She had no
child and bore no reproach, among her simple neigh-
bours the most fortunate, probably, but the most
celebrated of the villain's many victims. She even-
tually married a farmer from Caldbeck, and her grave
may be seen to-day, near by that one distinguished
by the curiously sporting tombstone beneath which
lies the dust of John Peel of immortal memory.

Crummock is just twice the length of Buttermere,
with about the same average width of half a mile.
Like the other, it is pressed between the feet of
steep mountains, and has the same charm at the
open and upper end of silvery strand shelving from
meadowy banks, with the same clusters of fir, alder,
or gnarled oak grouped gracefully about the grassy
shore. Here, too, on still summer days the same
crystal water shows far out into the lake the clean,
white, gravelly bottom on which it lies. There are
two or three boats, moreover, available on Crummock,
and it is out on the bosom of the lake that this

52 THE ENGLISH LAKES

whole beautiful vale, above and below it, is displayed
perhaps to the best advantage. The now remoter
heights of Honister and its companions fill the head.
The steeps of High Stile and Red Pike dip to the
gorge near by, whence issues the hoarse murmur of
Scale Force making its sheer leap of a hundred and
twenty feet, and spraying with perennial moisture
the ferns, mosses, and feathery saplings that cling
to its shaggy cliffs. Above the lower heights upon
the eastern shores rise the higher fells of Whiteside
and Grassmoor, the latter bearing the strange un-
healed red scars where its whole front was shaved
away a century and a half ago by a tremendous
waterspout.

A May morning out on Crummock, the fly rod laid
aside in despair for the moment with its capricious
little trout, though the compensations forbid so un-
toward a word; the boat drifting idly with gently
gurgling keel upon the faint ripples stirred by the
very softest of zephyrs; the distant murmur of the
Cocker splashing toward the lake head; the faint
dull roar of Scale Force, and, above all, the silent
throng of overhanging mountains fairly pealing with
the cuckoo's note, is a memory always to be trea-
sured. Another such morning, too, comes back
to me, when splashes of brilliant blue lay here
and there upon the eastern shore of the lake, disclos-

BUTTERMERE 53

ing to a nearer view great beds of bluebells at the
height of their glory. A moonlight night again, the
sequel of the same or another such effulgent day, is
before me as, idly trolling for the bigger trout, those
prowlers of the night, one felt the awesome black
shapes of the mountains piled up on every hand,
while the slow, measured stroke of the oar struck
molten silver as we crossed and recrossed the moon's
shining path.

Stern and wild enough under the shadow of night
or beneath stormy skies, Crummock thrusts its gradu-
ally narrowing point deep into richer scenes of
woody foot-hill, and radiant meadow, overlooked by
the picturesquely perched old hostelry of Scale Hill,
familiar to generations of Lakeland tourists. And here
the Cocker leaps rejoicing and in fuller volume to
sparkle down the long, lovely vale of Lorton towards
its junction with the Derwent at Wordsworth's birth-
place. A mile or so to the westward Loweswater
lies bewitchingly in the lap of fells, but overhung
upon one bank for its entire length by the opulent
foliage of Holm Wood, and lacking the more rugged
features which dominate the others, seems to lie
somewhat aloof from them in quality as it does in
fact.

But one privilege of a sojourn in the valley is its
easy access, over the single ridge that divides them,

54 THE ENGLISH LAKES

to the famous but secluded trough of Ennerdale,
lying parallel to that of Buttermere. The prospect
from Scarth Cap before descending into one of the
wildest valleys in all Lakeland has a peculiar grim-
ness, for the long array of precipitous steeps and
crags that confront one above the twisting thread
of the beck hurrying down to Ennerdale Lake turn
their savage fronts so uncompromisingly to the north.
The more radiant the summer morn, the brighter the
summer day, the darker by contrast with the inter-
ludes of spring verdure that no north aspect can
quench are the impenetrable shadows which mask
all detail, and make fearsome precipices out of rugged
but accessible steeps. For above them the Pillar
Mountain almost touches 3000 feet, and the far-famed
Pillar Rock springing from its outskirts, whose naked
walls need no black shadows for their enhancement.
But this is wandering from our immediate subject,
and involving us in the group of big mountains that
cluster round Scafell. Far down the valley the lake
of Ennerdale, in size and shape resembling Crummock,
glistens at the fringe of civilization. If local genii
count for aught, that of this valley, though not nearly
so familiar, should surely be '*t'girt dog of Enner-
dale".

The first notice of his appearance was in May, 1816,
when carcasses of three or four sheep killed and as

SCALE FORCE, CRUMMOCK WATER

BUTTERMERE 55

many mangled were found in Lower Ennerdale. Such
mishaps were common enough, but the usual sequel,
the destruction of the dog within a few days, utterly
failed here. Every device known was futile before
this formidable vampire. For a long time no trace
could be found of him, but in the increasing toll of
victims that greeted the shepherd's eye in ever-
changing and unexpected quarters. He never visited
the same place twice within an ordinary space of
time, and the scene of some of his raids were twenty
miles apart. He worked entirely at night, laying low
through the day in woods and ditches. His bi-weekly
or tri-weekly toll increased with his rage for blood, and
the hue and cry raised everywhere brought him into
view occasionally in the early mornings. But while
men with guns were lying for him in one place, he
would be enjoying himself on some unsuspected hill-
side ten miles away. The toll of victims mounted
into the hundreds; June and July passed away, and
"f girt dog" was still master of the situation, the
growing grain crops giving him ampler refuge.

Half the men in the country spent the night
afield with guns, and were worn out with watching.
Many idlers, tempted by the large reward offered,
seized the chance to join the chase, and the states-
men's wives waxed weary of cooking meals for all and
sundry by day and night. The children were afraid

56 THE ENGLISH LAKES

to tread their often lonely paths to school, and screamed
in their sleep that "t'girt dog" was after them. The
mountain foxhounds were brought up and laid on.
But the girt dog with his greyhound blood ran away
from them all, carrying the line on one occasion from
Ennerdale to St. Bees on the coast, and on another to
Cockermouth. The following, on this occasion, con-
sisted of two hundred souls. It was a Sunday, and
passing Ennerdale Church during service in full cry
had added to the field the males of the congregation
as one man, including the parson. The humours of
some of these exhilarating hunts as told by a con-
temporary pen are delightful. Once, when surrounded
by guns in a cornfield, the ingenious quarry singled
out the least efficient sportsman, Will Rothbury, who,
as the sanguinary beast broke cover and ran past him
within easy shot, leaped up in the air instead of firing
and cried out, "Skerse, what a dog!" The latter,
shaken for a moment out of his presence of mind,
bolted between the notoriously bandy legs of a deaf
old man who was gathering faggots, unconscious of
the excitement. Not till the middle of September
did the girt dog succumb after a long chase. He
was set up in Keswick Museum with a collar round
his neck describing his exploits. Such, in brief, for
much more might be told, is the story of ^'t'girt
dog of Ennerdale".

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